I've been thinking of this poem recently - not sure why. That second line hangs out in my head along with many other wonderful lines from university study-the-Romantics days. I remember going to a the garden of a friend of a friend outside London a few years after university finished. He was a retired maker of shoes and talked about 'lasts' etc and had a lovely drooping lime tree which we stood under (inside, really) into the twilight ... 'a delight' no less.

Don't you love this passage?

Now, my friends emerge

Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again

The many-steepled tract magnificent

Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,

With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up

The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles

Of purple shadow!

So much compressed into there, such a hugeness of vision and yet caught inside those controlled and perfect words. The third line, hear those sounds...

Now do go to the Tuesday Poem hub by clicking on the quill in the sidebar for a poem translated from the Russian, and the original Russian is there too, thanks to Orchid Tierney. Lovely.

nd though now the batWheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,I hadn't read this poem, Mary, but I loved the lines:

"Yet still the solitary humble-beeSings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall knowThat Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,No waste so vacant, but may well employEach faculty of sense, and keep the heartAwake to Love and Beauty!"

Very true of Chriscthurch these days: I pass many vacant lots on my works and with spring see the first hardy weeds springing up, evergreen and occsaionally colourful as well!

A blog on audacious writers & books especially NZ writers & books

Mary McCallum

This isn't me, it's my god-daughter & daughter. I like it better than the pic of me; and the two unmatched eyes are how I feel sometimes - one the prose eye, one the poetry. Or one the writer, one the publisher, for I have started up Mākaro Press. Click the photo to see.

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There isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails. "--Raymond Carver

"Within every story another story is hidden, autonomous and unfolding though scarcely noticed except now and then, inadvertently, when, just as with a slip of the tongue a woman exposes a bit of the turbulent life under way in her unconscious mind, a rat scurries through an open window with a doll’s head in its mouth, or a man shouts a couplet from a passing bus ('o queens of urbanity, kings of the crush / let’s sing of convenience, importance, and plush')." Lyn Hejinian • Conjunctions